Tag: food

In my last post “Cooking with whatever I have in the cupboard”, I attempted to make spicy tomato baked eggs using whatever I already had knocking around the kitchen, trying to follow a recipe, but ending up pretty much making it up with the ingredients I had to hand.

I’d got a few comments on it linking me through to some other seriously tasty looking recipes that I wanted to try out… so this is my second attempt at cooking something half decent with the random food I already had at home.

I was inspired to make some veggie rice and chickpea patties after seeing a recipe over on chocolateforbasil.com and needless to say it ended up being pretty much totally different to the recipe that I saw, although it kept some key components and ended up tasting a LOT better than it looked!

For this recipe I found the following items that needed using up:

lime

eggs

mozzarella cheese

Mexican rice

organic chickpeas

Sriracha sauce

sour cream with chives

garlic

onion

chilli

wholemeal pitta breads

I crushed the chickpeas until they were a little more malleable and then mixed in some rice, chilli, garlic, half the onion, Sriracha, eggs, half the lime and half the mozzarella.

Once this was all mixed together I formed the mixture into patties and fried in a sizzling hot pan with some hot olive oil, carefully flipping them over once i was confident they had cooked enough to stabilise.

After about 5 /7 minutes cooking on each side they were hot, golden and the mozzarella had totally melted – it was time to serve them up.

I sliced up the rest of the onion, thinly sliced the remaining mozzarella, and put them in the pitta along with the patties. I added a generous helping of Sriracha sauce and plenty of sour cream and a big squeeze of lime too.

…and that’s it – my boyfriend cleared his entire plate (and went for seconds) which tells me I’m not the only one who thought it tasted pretty good (honest!!)

What’s the weirdest creation you’ve come up with when you’ve been trying to use up what you already have in the cupboards?

Spicy tomato baked eggs

In this post, I’m going to attempt to make spicy tomato baked eggs using whatever I have in the cupboard, and just getting creative if I don’t have the exact ingredients.

My close friends and family will back me up when I say I’m a pretty lazy cook during the week..With a busy work and social life, spending vast amounts of time in the kitchen or food shopping is not ideal for me, and I’m pretty sure there’s plenty of others like me in the same situation.

So I thought I’d set myself a challenge of cooking relatively healthy meals based on existing recipes, but using what I already have in my kitchen instead of buying more (One of my new years resolutions is to waste less food!)

So let’s start with the recipe I found on BBC good food (here) with the ingredients listed as:

1 tbsp olive oil

2 red onion, chopped

1 red chilli, deseeded and finely chopped

1 garlic clove, sliced

small bunch coriander, stalks and leaves chopped separately

2 400g cans cherry tomato

1 tsp caster sugar

4 eggs

Looking in my cupboards I had the following:

olive oil

chilli flakes

chopped garlic

passata/tinned tomatoes

mixed herbs (dried)

caster sugar

eggs

white onion

I also had some vegetarian chicken fillets and decided to stick those in too

So I started cooking along taking the following steps:

Heat the oil in a frying pan that has a lid, then soften the onions, chilli paste, and garlic for 5 mins until soft then add the veggie ‘chicken’ until heated through. Stir in the tomatoes, tomato puree, sugar, and herbs then bubble for 10 mins until thick.

I also added a dash of white wine (since I had a glass of it in my hand…)

Once the cooked through, put the contents of the pan into a baking dish and cracked the eggs over the top, place in the oven at around 180 degrees (fan assisted oven) for around 5 mins or until the eggs are cooked.

…and that’s basically it.

I wasn’t expecting this to taste particularly great; as it was really easy to make and I’d changed the ingredients quite a bit, but it was actually really tasty (although in all honesty, it would have been better without the eggs)

Let me know in the comments if you have any good (easy to make) recipe suggestions!